Ecommerce has revolutionized in the last few years at an exponential rate. With the rise of online selling, opening an online store is a good idea for gaining profits.
Nowadays, a company’s online presence is crucial to its success. This is the logic behind the majority of the small, medium, and even large retail stores moving online. To assist eCommerce stores, a variety of platforms are available but picking the ideal eCommerce store can be tricky.
Every online store has its own set of unique requirements. To get the ideal platform, you should be aware of basic differences. Knowing this will help in the selection of suitable platforms according to your business needs.
Read this blog post to understand the services offered by two popular eCommerce platforms, i.e., Prestashop and Opencart. I will compare different aspects of these two successful digital commerce platforms. After reading this blog, you will know about choosing the right platform as per your business needs.
The Basic Differences Between Opencart and Prestashop are:
Based on cost/pricing
Both Opencart and Prestashop can be downloaded and installed for free because they are both open-source platforms. However, store owners must factor in all necessary costs before starting the store. The factors to keep in mind are web hosting, domain, SSL certificate, modules, and extensions.
The transparent, reasonable hosting price of Opencart gives it the benefit over Prestashop.
User Interface
PrestaShop is a very user-friendly eCommerce platform. It features a front office that is customizable and a back office that is simple to use. Additionally, it provides several add-on modules to enhance its internal operations. It offers a stylish dashboard to users where you can quickly access the performance of your store.
Because of its aesthetically pleasing interface, Opencart is fairly user-friendly. Additionally, this platform offers a contemporary admin panel that resembles those of other eCommerce builders. Thus, learning to use and design your Opencart store won’t take you very long.
Templates and Themes
A large selection of expertly designed responsive eCommerce themes is available from Opencart. On its official Marketplace, you can find both free and paid templates. Moreover, if you have a working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can quickly apply it to your store. It can be a little challenging for newcomers. But there are many third-party resources available, including TemplateToaster, ThemeForest, etc.
Additionally, PrestaShop has an official store with over 3,000 website layouts. Moreover, it offers a simple buying experience and a wide range of high-quality, customizable eCommerce themes.
SEO Features
OpenCart doesn’t provide anything particularly noteworthy in terms of SEO. However, it is not the worst either. In essence, it provides all the key features you can anticipate from a high-end eCommerce system. Additionally, it enables you to quickly move your store to the top of SERPs. Store owners can also add header and title tags, meta keywords, and descriptions to each product and category page. Moreover, it handles building excellent SEO URLs right out of the box nicely. To improve your SEO, you can always install plugins.
PrestaShop, on the other hand, has a comprehensive set of built-in SEO capabilities. It allows business owners to change every page, creates SEO-friendly URLs, and add powerful meta tags, and rich snippets. It has lots of features to increase traffic to the website.
Prestashop Modules and Opencart Plugins
Surprisingly, PrestaShop has more than 3700 modules that support numerous aspects. This includes design and navigation, shipping and logistics, administration, promotion and marketing, payment, etc.
It is noteworthy that various developers make these modules. As a result, it is challenging to assess whether they function well together. In the worst-case scenario, the integration of these modules can cause unknown errors in your store. This impacts how your company operates as a whole.
Like PrestaShop, Opencart enables store owners to incorporate more than 13,000 pre-installed extensions and plugins. Developers and Opencart partners offer all add-ons. The majority of them are either free or cost money.
Criteria of Speed
Opencart outperforms Prestashop in terms of speed by a small margin. However, many variables affect how quickly an online store loads. This includes the number of products offered, total visitors the site accommodates, the web hosting company, and the overall design of the site. Because of this, no platform is quicker than the others.
Payment and Shipping
Regarding shipping and payment gateway integrations, Opencart offers a wide range of options. PayPal, MYOB AccountRight, authorize.Net, Skrill, SagePay, WFDS, UPS, Next Logistics, MailChimp, PayZippy, ShipWire, Eurostop, Visual 2000, and other well-known integrations are just a few of the important ones it provides.
Prestashop provides slightly fewer shipping connectors and payment gateways than Opencart. PayPal, eBay, authorize.Net, Google Analytics, Simplify by Mastercard, WordPress, SEO Expert, Amazon Marketplace, Advanced Search 4, and others are just a few of the prominent integrations.
Conclusion
As far as the Prestashop vs. Opencart argument goes, it is fairly difficult to create an informed view. Both of these eCommerce platforms are quite well-liked by eCommerce stores. eCommerce systems can be quite complicated. However, the PrestaShop eCommerce themes are better than the Opencart ones. Although it gives off a somewhat more modern vibe, the final say always belongs to you.
It’s difficult to say if Opencart or Prestashop is better. Prestashop outperforms Opencart in terms of customer support, SEO, and marketing features, among all the other factors mentioned. Prestashop lags much behind Opencart in terms of pricing and store design & themes. This means that choosing the platform that relies on your business’s needs and budget is a smart decision.
We advise you to carefully study each point above before selecting the platform that best fits your needs. You can contact us at support@knowband.com with any questions or concerns. I sincerely hope that this information will help you choose the best platform.
We at knowband can also help you set up your store on Prestashop or Opencart. If you already have a store, we can help you take it further with our various modules. For example, our No Code Mobile App builder: